One Comment

I can’t understand why Les Bleus de Ramville won???? it’s a nice, tidy title design but it’s outdated, there is nothing special about it,
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo should have been the winner, it’s clean, modern, has breath taking visuals, it’s 2012 people! not 1992!

Ben Radatz: For most of the titles, we come in very early. We’ve read the script and are involved with how the film is progressing, which helps give us context as we’re putting together the sequence. There were a couple times where we weren’t sure what the final film was going to be. That’s a bit of a trial and error process, but you work through it until you find the right process that works for the film.

Kurt Volk: I mainly work for Robert Rodriguez, so i’m in the unique position of starting on the process really early and doing all the key art, photographing the actors, and designing the logos in addition to the titles. Sometimes we’ll be working on the titles and posters before a script is even written. I don’t necessary have the luxury of choosing what I work on, since I’m working on whatever is at the studio, but I consider it a great honor to make sure that the key art, title sequence, and all of the art associated with the film has a unified look and belong to the same family.

Gareth Smith: In a feature film, a title sequence can often run one and a half to two and a half minutes, which is a lot of the film up front that sets up the tone of your movie, so it’s important that it’s not being done at the last minute in post-production. Our favorite projects have involved the directors approaching us when they had the screenplay. With Jason Reitman, he gives us the screenplay and we have months to think about ways to integrate the title sequence into the film. For instance, with Juno, because we were able to plan it all out before they shot the movie, we were able to ask them to give us a couple shots from the film shoot.

Jenny Lee: On the other hand, when you work on a title sequence after everything has been shot, you have a chance to watch the film from beginning to end and get a sense of the film’s tone. You can pick up visual elements that develop into a motif for the sequence.

On the Limitations within Title Design

Gareth Smith: In the independent film scene, you don’t have to worry as much. But on a studio feature, every title in the sequence is based on the size of another title in the sequence. We’ve had instances where the main actor needs to have their title 75% size of the main title, or a person will need to have their name the average size of the rest of the crew.

Kurt Volk: The same thing happens with movie posters, where there’s contractual obligations that someone gets top billing. You’ll run into instances where an actor’s head has to be 80% of the size of another head. It’s not just making something that looks beautiful that everyone enjoys. It’s a challenge like everything else. But when you can push something through or get a waiver, there’s even more sense of accomplishment.

The panel was followed by a screening of the twenty finalists. The styles ranged from epic powerhouse pieces like Elastic’s Game of Thrones and Blur’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to self-initiated projects like James Curran’s take on The Adventures of TinTin and Clemens Wirth’s Herbst.

I liked the mix of television and film titles, hopping from the live-action, comedic, world-building of Sarofsky Corp.’s Shameless to the pitch perfect design in Prologue Films’ X-Men: First Class to the exquisite rendering in Dvein’s Eva.